The Melancholy of Mechagirl (3 page)

She walks up—everything is up here. The houses terrace up through the hills, one on top of the other, like stacking bowls. She memorizes the vending machines along her path like a thread through a labyrinth. Green water bottles, candy, Coca-Cola products. The house she lives in now has another house inside it. As though it is pregnant. As though it is alive. The other house is meant for in-laws, closed up behind screens with snowy pines and serene partridges painted on them. A second living room, tiny and concealed behind a frozen pinecone. Hiding behind a clutch of partridge eggs, a second master bedroom, a second office. It unnerves her. It seems to say she should fill the other house with something. But she has nothing but herself. It is the nature of a naval officer to be absent. That is the kind of creature he is. When he sees a home, he longs to leave it. She loves him, she thinks, because he can destroy her.

She does not yet know what kind of creature she is. She is very young. Right now, she is a creature that interprets sigils, assigns them a private meaning until she can learn the public one. She is a creature walking at night in a green dress. The train goes by on elevated tracks somewhere far above her. She has begun to suspect she got married for the wrong reasons, and to the wrong person. But it’s not important information. He isn’t here and isn’t going to be. She is as alone as she has ever been. She isn’t married to a person. She is married to an empty house. To a country that is a stranger to her. To a house inside a house.

The woman turns the corner and stops short. Before her, a white tunnel opens up in the mountain. Cassia roots hang down in front of it. It seems to go nowhere and it seems to go on forever. Fluorescent lights fill up frosted plastic walls. Panels here and there have gone out, leaving long rectangles of black, lightless space. Bike paths line either side of the road through the tunnel. Electric green spiders spool down from the ceiling, flashing as they spin. She does not understand the tunnel. She does not have an explanation for it. She does not even know if she wants to go into it, to see where it goes. Like everything else, it is a sigil.

INK

Tsuma and Kyorinrin are lovers.

When they have been at each other, Kyorinrin must bathe a second time before sunrise. Once after his story, and once after his mate. The whole of his paper roll is covered with Tsuma. 妻 big and small, dark and ghost-grey, graceful and awkward—and growing sloppier as the night wears on. The characters are still wet when Kyorinrin washes them away. Wet and black and rimmed with another color, the color of raisins, the color of her love.

In the midnight center of his roll, one 妻 glows huge and deep and all violet, all glow. It is the 妻 of her climax. It is a secret 妻 only Kyorinrin knows. He looks at it a long time before he rinses it clear. It makes him think of new stories. It makes him think of the liquid sound of her, landing on his parchment body like a detonation.

Tsuma is shy except when she is inking him. It took her a long time to learn to say anything but her own name and the name of the refrigerator manufacturer. She still feels uncertain of her accent. But when she repeats herself against the body of Kyorinrin, she has no uncertainty. She knows how to say herself. She knows how to write herself.

“I am going to name her Akemi!” Kyorinrin rustles with excitement.

Characters appear on his body. Kyorinrin has beautiful penmanship.

“That is not a Western name,” whispers Tsuma. “Your research is untidy.”

“But I like the
sound
of Akemi. It doesn’t matter anyway. I made her, so I own her. And I say what her name is.” Kyorinrin darkens with writing. “I am going to make her lonely because that is true to life. Her husband went to war and left her. Akemi does not speak Japanese or read it either, so when she looks at kanji she makes up stories about it so that she can remember which bus to take home and whether the onigiri at the market has salmon in it, which she likes, or salted plum, which she does not like.”

“Don’t name her that, Kyorinrin.”

“I have named the other wives after American first ladies. It will show up her sense of abandonment that she does not have a political name.”

“All names are political.” Tsuma toes the dust of the factory floor with the tip of one brushstroke.

“I am writing a story about a white woman who is writing a story about Japan. She writes her story because she is angry, so angry she is like a bull inside the skin of a person. Her horns pierce her from the inside. She writes her story to stand between her and her anger. I write my story because I am also angry.”

“What are you angry about? I hope I have not—”

Kyorinrin interrupts her, and he does it so cleanly it is as though her voice has been erased.

“No, no, that is not what I mean.” Writing moves more quickly over the surface of the scroll. “I am angry because I was left here. Because when the glass case broke I was the only one who jumped out. I was alone. I thought at least Jizo would be like me. Alive like me. I am angry because people will never come back to make umbrellas here on account of the ordnance buried quite nearby. I am angry because the war has been over for a long time but when I decided to write a story about Yokosuka, the first thing I thought of was the American Navy. I am angry because I am hungry and the pink dye is almost gone.”

Tsuma comes to him and touches the edge of his paper with the edge of her ink.

“It’s all right,” Kyorinrin whispers.

Tsuma eases down onto him. The shape of her blooms on his body. The bronze chrysanthemum on his roller moans with relief.

WATER

Inari is female now. She has no attachment to gender. The way some blush or sweat or yawn, that is the way Inari shifts between male and female and androgyne. She opens a basket and begins to pull out her mail to sort. Inari receives her mail once a week. It is a principal joy for her.

On the top of the mail basket crinkle the carbon papers of a gas bill. In addition to the gas bill, Inari has received a notice to appear in court for traffic violations, tax documents, a shipment of rice in individual two-kilogram red bags, a crate of kabocha squash, three pornographic magazines, a kit to build a radio-controlled mecha-warrior (decals, laser-axe, operator figurine, and a variety of canonical paint colors included), a Muji catalog, and seventeen issues of her favorite manga, none from the same series, as Inari reads widely and bores easily.

Time is not meaningful for Inari and Futsukeshibaba. They are watching an Admiral collect soil from the shore and put it in a crystal bottle for his comrades back home. They are watching trade negotiations stretching through the summer. They are watching the festival of the dead one hundred years from now light the bay with so many lanterns and scorch the sky with so many rockets that the city looks like the inside of Futsukeshibaba. They are watching the capital come to Kamakura eight hundred years past. They are watching it leave again. Futsukeshibaba is watching Inari give birth, sometimes to foxes and sometimes to gods. Inari is watching Futsukeshibaba make careful love to a blue paper lantern in the Kyoto springtime. They are watching detonations. They are watching the new economy. They are watching the cherry blossoms in Tsukayama Park. They are watching the Yokohama BayStars play the Hiroshima Carp. They are watching girls dance in Roppongi under orange and blue lights. They are watching the cypress roofs of the royal residences burn. They are watching sailors sleep on the black ships in Uraga Harbor and they are watching Futsukeshibaba performing her duty during the war, keeping Tokyo dark while the sirens sing.

Inari holds up one of her pornographic magazines in her tail, whose tip blazes with pale fur.

“There is a piece of fiction in between the naked pictures here,” she announces indignantly.

“This offends you?” answers Futsukeshibaba. “I have heard fiction pays better when nakedness is involved.”

“Obviously I am not offended,” snaps the fox-god. “I am the patron of writers. But in this story an American travels to Tokyo and gets drunk in Roppongi on loud fuschia drinks. But little does he know the beautiful woman in the white miniskirt dancing with him is Yuki-Onna, the vampire goddess of winter!”

“Too bad for him,” smirks Futsukeshibaba. “She’s going to freeze his pancreas and then dive down his throat to eat it.”

Inari’s fox eyes glitter. “
Ah
, but that is not what happens! Instead the American
fucks
Yuki-Onna and the fuck is so good she lets him live!”

Inari has a filthy mouth. She is a trickster; she cannot help it.

“Yuki-Onna is my sister! How dare this writer say that is a thing that could happen! She can’t even fuck humans; their pitiful cocks cannot penetrate her because her hymen is made of polar ice. You cannot get inside her. You can only look at her right before she devours you. Leave it to these
things
,” she gestures at the sleeping men in the ships below, “to not know the difference between eating and fucking.”

Futsukeshibaba smiles to herself. She puts her hand on her belly where all the light she has ever consumed dwells.

“And why is Aoandon the blue paper lantern not with us tonight?” asks the fox-god, meaning to be cruel because the old woman did not give her an answer.

“She will leave me for a paper scroll in sixty years. We are not speaking right now. I will get over it. She will love him for the same reason that we love each other now: a blue paper lantern is a being of fire and a great scroll is made of paper and she will know she could destroy him with the merest blink of her cyan eye. But it will never be an equal match, because the scroll cannot harm her the same way. If he tried to smother her flame, he would only set himself ablaze. You can only truly love someone who can destroy you.”

Together, Inari and Futsukeshibaba watch a scroll unroll himself and beg the blue paper lantern of his desire to remove her shade with the faded carp swimming on it. He begs her to bring her naked flame as close as he can bear it. On the body of the scroll, round scalds appear, rust-colored against his unblemished page. When he can take no more of it, he turns the chrysanthemum end of his bronze roller to her flame and lets her flicker against it until the carp shimmers gold and wriggles upstream.

“No one can destroy me,” says Inari, as though she is considering it for the first time.

“I’m sure that’s not true,” answers Futsukeshibaba. She pats the fox’s tail comfortingly.

Inari hopes that the radio-controlled mecha will be sturdy enough for her to wear when it is done. If she does not put the operator figurine inside, there will be room for a fox. So long as the kit experienced good quality control, Inari is confident she will be able to swing her laser-axe just like Junko, the Triumphant Neon Champion of Saturn.

MILK

Akemi stands inside the tunnel. She can see it doesn’t really go nowhere. It goes on a long way, but there is a dark circle out there at the end which surely means it connects to the world again. Akemi’s hair is soaked and knotted. She is from a cold city in the mountains—she has never known heat like this, heat that embraces you, clothes you, knows you intimately, suckles at you until you feed it on your sweat. The night beats blue and dark and Akemi feels full of that grasping, manic, gravityless sadness that always comes when she has not slept. She is full of books she might write. She is full of the next two years she will spend alone and she is full of her loneliness. She is full of the cicadas’ scream. She has not cried. The other wives told her not to cry; it upsets the men when you cry.

She is full of little lights blowing out one by one by one.

Akemi imagines meeting someone else in the tunnel. Someone beautiful, someone unlike her. His name should be Taro, like the boy in the fairy tale. He could tell her how his parents longed for a child so deeply and the lack of one was such a wound to them that they went to a fertility clinic in Yokohama. In the lobby of the clinic a vending machine would have offered his mother and father peach candies, peach juice, peach tea, peach cookies, and pickled peach slices wrapped in cello-foil. The nurse might have brought them into a cold room with peach-colored walls and introduced herself as Momoko, which means “peach child.” His mother would have laid down in a paper gown with cartoonish peach blossoms printed on it and stood with Taro inside her like a stone in a fruit. Akemi imagined liking this story enough to take Taro home and show him her nakedness in the house inside her house. It is a way she could destroy her husband, as he can destroy her. She has never had that power. She wants to be in a story like that, but the tunnel is empty.

Many years from now, Akemi will be unable to separate her marriage from Japan. She will not think of the time before it or after it. Japan will be the face of her husband. She will love Japan because it did not leave her. It did not accept her, but it did not leave her. His eyes will be the bays on either side of Yokosuka and his mouth will be a
torii
gate and his voice will be the schoolgirls on the train and her eyes will be the eyes of the women on a game show she watches on New Year’s Eve, who must keep a perfect smile while battered from all sides with kitchen implements thrown by some offstage hand. And she will write about it forever and inside her writing about it the terrible simple sentence will repeat but never appear:
I hated my husband even before he left
.